Helmut Puff, ‘Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherine Hetzeldorfer (1477)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern History, 30 (2000), pp. 41-61.
Helmut Puff’s article focuses on the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer in 1477, who was charged for sexual relations with numerous women. The court investigation was predominantly concerned with how Hetzeldorfer was able to embody a masculine role. Puff argues that it was the fact that she infiltrated the ranks of men by dressing as a man and by appropriating a phallus that made her a victim of harsh retribution. The trial took place in late medieval Speyer, where there was increasing anxiety about cross-dressing, as seen in the fact that the magistrate prohibited women from wearing men’s clothes, and later, men from wearing women’s clothes. Her highly visible execution, which involved drowning, reinscribed the ‘right’ gender on her body, and therefore publicly legitimised urban rulers in their attempt to ensure a supposedly natural order of creation. As one of the earliest examples of the punishment of lesbianism in the secular realm, Puff claims that the trial inaugurated an era in which women who engaged in sex with other women were at times severely persecuted.
Puff coins the term ‘female sodomy’ as an attempt to rectify traditional historiography which suggests that sexual relations between women in the late medieval and early modern periods were too few to merit any significant historical attention. According to Puff, the term characterises a range of significations beyond the transgression of the sexual order and it usefully provides insight into the precarious domain of emotions, passions, and desires. It also intends to reveal those highly significant moments when knowledge of female homoeroticism was penetrated in the male sphere; in these encounters, female homoeroticism was cast in masculine terms.
The courtroom was the principal location where same-sex practices were articulated in the medieval period. It is in such court records that the secular authorities represented verbally what was normally considered unspeakable. Basing the article on such a document is certainly useful, because the intersection of moral, legal and sexual discourse provide valuable insights into pre-modern constructions of sexuality and the gradual fashioning of a vernacular discourse on sodomy. However, it is limited by the fact that it does not provide insight into a comprehensive range of what female homoerotic relations what have meant in pre-modern society, since it primarily reveals male perceptions about women who engaged in sex with other women.